Yglesias links to Entertainment Weekly’s chat with Zack Snyder, director of the upcoming Watchmen movie adaptation, and hatches a promising new conspiracy theory. I haven’t got much to add, but I do want to point out this Q&A between Snyder and Wizard Magazine. I understand the reservations about Snyder — and I share them, to some extent — but he’s certainly saying all the right things.

The early signs at last night’s Hold Steady show were not good. A group of fans had shown up wearing “Unified Scene Drinking Team” softball shirts. And while I couldn’t say exactly what Craig Finn had in mind when he invented the first half of that phrase, I was pretty sure it didn’t involve flipcup.

The opening act compounded the problem. Homogenous pop/punk with a Bosstones scream — they weren’t my thing, really, although a lot of the crowd liked them. Tuning out early gave me plenty of time to think about why the Hold Steady had given them an opening slot. I concluded that it wasn’t the band, it was the idea of the band — they were joyful and enthusiastic. And visually, they covered all the bases: there were a couple of tattooed rap/rock fireplugs, an asymptotically skinny indie boy, a nerd-rock drummer peering through dirty hair and ludicrous glasses, and a little keyboard-playing white girl in a pretty Motown dress. My friend Chris summed it up well when he said they looked like a rock band from The Sims.

Which left me in an awkward position. As much as anything the Hold Steady have built themselves on a downright mythic idea of rock and roll and the people that listen to it. I can’t say I’ve ever been a part of a scene like that, but it always sounded pretty good to me. Now I was standing there, staring at what I could only take to be a living shorthand for what they’d had in mind, and it was a cartoon. Suddenly I was in a crowd of fellow fucking tourists, wondering if I’d be wearing a softball jersey, too, if I’d been born into the wrong online neighborhood.

But then the band took to the stage and I realized what you probably already have: this is all ridiculous. Their stories are too good, the music’s too good, to get tangled up in worry over authenticity. By the end of the first song Craig Finn had made us toast Joe Strummer, and I found I didn’t even care if, for the people around me, the honoree wasn’t any more real than Charlemagne or Holly. Their hands stayed up after the toast, and that turned out to be the important thing.

The show wasn’t recorded, but the band did a set from this tour on World Cafe, and you can listen to or download it here. If the links wind up broken let me know and I’ll repost ‘em.

ONE FOR THE SKEPTICS: Here, listen to this:

Image by Flickr user hyku, used under a Creative Commons license

I meant to post this important news earlier, but forgot. Now, shocked back into attention by an outpouring of public interest on Flickr (a comment was left), let me try to make up for lost time.

It has, according to Wikipedia, taken us almost a century to get here. But we have arrived at a solution: Carolina-style Utz chips. These are the chips, people.

I realize that regional pride might propel some of you toward Crab Chips. But you’re better than that. Crab Chips are a mirthless joke, an exaggerated accent, a story they tell to tourists.

The Carolina-style chip is a precise equation, a tensegrity tower constructed from flavored powder: half barbecue, half salt & vinegar. Its elegance cannot be overstated, although that elegance may not be completely apparent if you cram them into your mouth with the same enthusiasm I do.

You’ve already seen this, but for the record: Brian has emerged victorious, as he inevitably must in a world that still clings to some shred of sanity — or, at the least, aspires to dignity.

Impressively, over 221,000 votes were cast for Brian. That’s one out of every four District residents, and about a hundred thousand more than were cast in the city during the 2006 election! Truly, this represents a mandate. A mandate to continue being hot.

ALSO: An impressive showing by runner-up Jeff Young. One to watch for 2009! I think this kid’s got a big upside.

Interesting developments on the Logan Circle listserv! Apparently the new Shaw library has been going through a design process since January, at which time residents were shown this design:

They liked it! But now months have passed, and somehow the project has changed into this:

It certainly looks, um, more… frugal? Maybe those who know something about architecture will be able to defend it on the merits. I don’t know anything about these matters, but I can see how some might think the earlier, prettier design is less interesting. Or maybe the second one really is the trainwreck it appears to be.

But I am in possession of not one but six chances at winning an entire pig thanks to the good people at the Montgomery County Fair 4-H Raffle. If I seem overly excited, I apologize. But I feel this is the rare sort of thing that justifies using multiple forms of textual emphasis in a single sentence.

The thing is billed as coming “ready to go in the fridge” but I have to confess I don’t know what that means. Am I entitled to hooves? The snout? What if I’m in need of sausage casing?

Well, the drawing’s not until the 16th. I’ll figure it out then, no doubt.

A comment left on a Raw Fisher post about the city’s new bikesharing program:

Around work I’m known as something of a Movable Type apologist. I can’t help it — it’s how I was raised. MT was the first thing I tried to install six years ago when I decided to check out the burgeoning blogging phenomenon, back when the media was merely interested in, rather than terrified of, the whole business.

Movable Type’s greatest strength is handling traffic, which of course is not something I’ve ever really needed it for. When you make a change to a site MT picks up all the data you’ve entered, passes it through your templates and generates a plain ol’ HTML file, which it then plops in the appropriate directory. It also updates a few other files, like your site’s main page. But these are similarly static (by “static” I mean a page that doesn’t ask the server to do any computation as it’s served). As you might imagine, serving static pages is a relatively easy task for a webserver — all the computational cost of composing a page is incurred once, when it’s created, and the result is saved. The overhead for each subsequent page-serving is consequently as small as it can be. This is what makes MT good at dealing with traffic.

But the system that does this is built on unappealingly old, slow technology. And besides, there are good reasons for wanting dynamic functionality on a page. You can create a hybrid sort of site — this blog is an example, as it uses a lot of PHP in its MT templates — but it’s a little awkward to build and maintain. You can extend the core MT system, too, but it’s not always well-suited to the task. Over the past few years I’ve watched as the folks at Gothamist, with the help of Apperceptive, have done this time and again, cajoling MT into accomplishing things that it really has no interest in doing. Sometimes I’ve been frustrated by this process; other times I’ve been impressed. Either way, their efforts can be fairly described as heroic. But if they were using a different platform there wouldn’t be a need for quite as much heroism. I suspect this wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Now Ars, acting uncharacteristically like a press release proxy, brings word of MT 4.2 Pro. Despite the enthusiastic writeup, the announcement leaves me about ready to call it a day on MT. Not that I’ll stop using it, mind you — porting this blog would be a pain — but it’s clear that its time is done. Six Apart is already retreating from the stab at openness that they made with MT4. And the warmed-over social networking features that they’re now offering feel just a bit desperate. There is nothing here that can’t be easily accomplished with WordPress MU or Drupal.

And that’s alright. I’m glad to see those other (free) projects ascendant: WordPress has managed to harness its community’s enthusiasm for writing some of the world’s worst PHP code and turned it into a successful, professional product that’s actually well-engineered (if subject to more security bulletins than I’d like to see). With the caching technologies it has available, there’s no longer a great reason for using MT.

And Drupal — well, I spend so much time with Drupal that my feelings are inevitably mixed. But I’d take it any day over Movable Type (and WordPress, for that matter).

I’m glad to keep a hand in MT. It’s a very different system than those other blogging platforms, and that’s probably good for me. But it’s no longer possible to make a great case on its behalf. The only thing it has going for it is the company behind it: if you buy a commercial license you can call up Six Apart and yell at them in a way that isn’t possible with non-corporate projects. That’s certainly enough to build a business on — ask Redhat. But in terms of total yelling period, I’m ready to concede defeat on behalf of MT proponents everywhere.

Ticket prices are dropping to face value. Anybody else planning to go on Thursday? I think I’m going to try my luck outside the show.

Not a deep thought by any means, but jesus is it embarrassing the extent to which two cups of coffee act to alter my mood. I don’t just mean providing pep and vigor; I mean lifting the veil from my eyes, restoring my hope for the future and engagement with the present, and generally making me into what I flatter myself to say is at least a semi-tolerable human being.

Whatever handicaps an adolescence spent playing Starfox and going to debate tournaments may have saddled me with, the experience at least shielded me from some dangerously cool compounds, and for that I should probably be grateful. I don’t think I’ve got the neurochemistry to handle anything more exotic than what can be found in the break room.